Until recently, I’ve been completely baffled by all of the hoopla in the Mac community surrounding text editors, especially relatively new ones. My thinking has been that most people must have something they’re comfortable with, since most everybody works with text quite often. But then some interesting editors aimed at professional writers came out, so I decided to take a look. Keep in mind that I’m doing these reviews on the basis of a few minutes using each program, not the few hours or days I’d need to really get the hang of them.

First up: WriteRoom, the full-screen text editor Merlin Mann of 43folders has been “pining for” for some time now. I have to say that I don’t really understand what the big deal is about having a full screen mode—are there really so many writers utterly incapacitated because they can see something other than the document they’re working on? When I say full screen mode is really the only major feature, it’s not a criticism—the developer is quite explicit about the purpose of the program. It does its job well, with a choice of colors too. And it’s kind of an interesting, retro, minimalist feeling to see only the blank screen and blinking cursor. But it solves a problem that I personally do not have, so I wouldn’t spend $25 on it.

Ulysses is designed to allow you to write longer-form pieces, so it creates documents within a “project.” You can then label these documents in different ways, such as “Plot” or “Sources,” and mark documents’ status, such as “Draft,” or “Revised.” You can write notes that are attached to the document, displayed in a separate window. It also offers a full screen mode that’s similar to WriteRoom, but not customizable. The interface feels very Mac-like, and uses pretty standard Cocoa elements, but still feels a little clinical to me; I suspect I’d get used to it after a while, but it doesn’t feel friendly. Apparently the program exports to a whole slew of document formats, including .doc for Word and LaTeX, which is pretty cool.

Ulysses has a bunch of features that I like in theory, but it’s not something I enjoy using right away. And with a price tag of 100 Euros (or something like $120), and a demo mode that’s not fully functional (saving and exporting are disabled) I am not going to spend the money to find out whether I’d grow to love it.

Scrivener is another program designed more-or-less explicitly for the long-form writer. It’s organized in a similar way to Ulysses, but it’s got a niftier feel to it, with a virtual corkboard where you can put little notecards summarizing each document—you reorder the project by moving around the notecards. Like Ulysses and WriteRoom, it offers a full screen mode. Unlike both, it allows you to place things like PDFs and audio files in a research folder you can refer to while writing. Scrivener’s biggest weakness, it seems to me, is the limited export options: it only exports as plain text or rich text (with attachments). Still, it’s the only one of these three with a combination of features and price point ($35) I might be interested in.

I’m glad to see that so many developers are making applications that separate content from presentation, taking away many of the “features” that make Word so annoying to writers, and allowing you to make use of the power of Tiger (especially Spotlight). Yet to make them do more than TextEdit requires an investment of a little time and money, so it’s probably only worth it if you’ve got a pretty serious project already in mind (or in drafts scattered around your desktop).